https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/69258Prayer
I know only of one prayer and that is absolute silence. The moment you say something you have destroyed it; hence the prayers that go on in the churches and the temples and the mosques and the synagogues are not true prayers, because you are saying something.
What is there to say to the whole? -- the whole knows it already. Before we know it the whole knows it. It is just stupid to go on saying things to God. It is meaningless.
One can simply sit silently. As far as the whole is concerned, language is meaningless, language has to be put aside. And to put aside language means you have put everything aside -- your mind, your knowledge, your scriptures, your religion, your church -- because they all belong to the world of language.
The moment you are silent you are not a Christian, nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan. The moment you are silent there is no Bible, no Koran, no Gita. The moment you are silent you are not an atheist, a theist, a communist, a socialist. Silence simply erases all that you have learned and accumulated. It makes you again a child, innocent, and innocence is prayer.
In that innocence something starts arising in your being with no effort on your part. Effortlessly a fragrance starts rising, the fragrance of gratitude.
It is not that you are doing it -- you are just a watcher, you see it happening. Just as perfume is rising above the rose flowers, going towards the stars, in that same way gratitude, gratefulness, thankfulness, wordlessly starts rising from your innermost core -- and that is the only prayer that is heard that reaches to God or to the whole.
And once you know the prayer of silence, once you know the music of silence you have known all that is worth knowing!
It contains all the scriptures in it, it contains Christ and Buddha and Zarathustra and Lao Tzu. It contains the experience of all the awakened ones; hence I don't teach you any scripture and I don't give you any doctrine and I don't enforce any discipline. I simply persuade you to be silent because there is nothing more valuable than silence. Silence is the door to the divine.
-Osho, "Nirvana now or never, #16, Q2"
